Longevity and managing risk – Edward Thorp
Excellent Bloomberg interview with legendary hedge fund icon Edward Thorp (age 91) on longevity and managing risk. Some quotes:
1. You can minimize that risk by what you eat and the kind of exercise you do and by regular checkups, so that if something is going wrong, you can address it before it gets worse.
2. Try to eliminate weak links. It just takes one weak link to finish you off. Like alcoholism or a terrible skiing accident.ç
3. Do proactive defenses like regular checkups
4. I remember back in the ’80s that I was going to go interview Jim Simons to see if I wanted to add him to a fund of funds. And I never went to the interview because I learned that he smoked in meetings. I just didn’t want the exposure. It didn’t matter in the early ’80s, because he was losing money then. He didn’t really turn things around until about 1989 or so, when I was no longer looking for people. He’s a very smart guy, but I’m astonished that he would succumb to an addiction like that. By the way, that’s one of the risks that I try to avoid: the whole class of addictions.